In both the Negro Leagues Book and Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, we find “Tatica Campos,” a multi-position player for various Cuban Stars teams of the 1910s and 1920s, up to his final U.S. season in 1930.
Checking up on Tatica from the Cuban side of things, however, we find three players named Campos during this time. Jorge Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball lists: 1) José “Tatica” Campos, a pitcher/infielder/outfielder who played in the Cuban League from 1913/14 through 1920/21; 2) B. Campos, who appeared briefly (only four at bats in seven games) for Almendares in 1914/15, the same team as Tatica; and 3) Roberto Campos, whose hometown is identified in the index as Manzanillo, an infielder/outfielder (but not pitcher) in the 1923/24 and 1926/27 Cuban League seasons, plus the rival “Triangular” league of 1926/27.
Patrick Rock, using passenger lists for ships from Cuba to the United States (just a fantastic resource), has found records of the Cuban Stars teams of the 1900s through 1920s. Patrick discovered that the Campos who traveled with the Cuban Stars in 1915-1917, and again in 1930, was named Francisco Campos. He was born in 1892 in Havana. On the 1923 Cuban Stars, however, it’s Roberto Campos, born about 1902 in Manzanillo.
So it seems clear that Roberto’s tenure with the ’23 Cuban Stars was mistakenly conflated with the career of the 1910s Campos. But what about Francisco Campos, as opposed to José? Was the Cuban Stars’ Campos in 1915-17 the same as the well-known Cuban Leaguer, Tatica Campos? It seems highly likely, considering that the Cuban Stars at the time were mostly drawn from Almendares, Tatica’s club. But could the Cuban Stars’ player have been the other Campos with Almendares at this time, the little-used outfielder B. Campos? Either way, the name Francisco, which appears repeatedly in the records, causes problems.
I checked the Cuban League box scores for the 1910s, focusing on 1914/15, the year that two players named Campos appeared with Almendares. It turns out that there were definitely two men with the name. One always appeared as “T. Campos” when first initials were given in box scores, and was often called “Tatica” in the game stories and play-by-plays. The other appeared both as “F. Campos” and as “S. Campos,” and is referred to three or four times (with both initials) as “el mejicano.” They appeared together in the lineup twice—both times as “T. Campos” and “S. Campos.” Here’s one of them, played on February 22 (La Lucha, February 23, 1915):
And here are the seventh and eighth innings of the play-by-play account. S. Campos, “el mejicano,” ends the seventh with a fly to center (he’s batting in the number three position, having taken Hidalgo’s place in center field). T. Campos, “Tatica,” pops to the pitcher for the second out of the eighth:
“B. Campos,” by the way, never crops up in 1914/15, at least in La Lucha—it could be that a blurry “S.” on microfilm was mistaken by someone for a “B.”
During both 1913/14 and 1915/16, there is clearly only one Campos on the Almendares roster, and he’s always called “T. Campos” and “Tatica Campos.” In 1917, however (the strange year when the games were played at Oriental Park, the racetrack, and the teams all took new names), Tatica Campos appeared in box scores as both “T. Campos” and “F. Campos.”
The second Campos of 1914/15 still muddies the waters a bit, but two things lead me to think that Tatica Campos of the Cuban League was the same as Francisco Campos of the Cuban Stars: 1) the second Campos of ‘14/15 was called “el mejicano,” which doesn’t have to refer to his national origin, but probably does—while the passenger records establish Francisco as a Cuban native; and 2) the 1917 instances of Tatica being called “F. Campos.”
We do still have the problem of the name “José” from Figueredo, though. I can say that I have never seen a “J. Campos” in a Cuban box score from this era. Perhaps his name was “José Francisco,” but he preferred to go by “Francisco.” Whatever the case, it seems clear that here we’ve managed to shed light in both directions, on Cuban and American baseball history.
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